1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and means for automatically deriving from a process model of a workflow management system (WFMS) or a computer system with comparable functionality a set of underlying application services and providing a means to locate these application services by creating entries in appropriate taxonomies.
2. Description of the Related Art
A new area of technology with increasing importance is the domain of workflow management systems (WFMSs). WFMSs support the modeling and execution of business processes. Business processes executed within a WFMS environment control which piece of work of a network of pieces of work will be performed by whom and which resources are exploited for this work. The individual pieces of work might be distributed across a multitude of different computer systems connected by some type of network.
The product IBM MQSeries Workflow (previously called IBM FlowMark) represents such a typical modern, sophisticated, and powerful workflow management system. It supports the modeling of business processes as a network of activities. This network of activities, the process model, is constructed as a directed, acyclic, weighted, colored graph. The nodes of the graph represent the activities which are performed. The edges of the graph, the control connectors, describe the potential sequence of execution of the activities. Definition of the process graph is via IBM MQSeries Workflow's Flow Definition Language (FDL) or via the built-in graphical editor. The runtime component of the workflow management system interprets the process graph and distributes the execution of activities to the right person at the right place, e.g. by assigning tasks in the form of work items to one or more wordlists associated with the respective person, wherein said wordlists and work items are stored as digital data within said workflow or process management system.
When companies start to exploit workflow technology to a larger extent, more and more application services are built as workflow-based applications. Note that workflow-based applications consist of a process model and activity implementations. Quite often new application services are constructed by scripting together existing application services/business processes. These new business processes are then typically higher-value business processes. With an increasing number of business processes, it is imperative that means are provided that help the users to easily find the business process that solves their business problem. This is normally achieved by organizing/categorizing the business processes into a particular taxonomy.
Placing the individual application services/business processes into a taxonomy is typically done manually. This approach has several disadvantages: (1) the task itself is time-consuming, (2) the skills needed and (3) if done by different people, the results are lacking consistency. Thus a technology is required that provides for the automatic generation of the appropriate taxonomy entries or even the generation of an appropriate taxonomy.
Moreover from a large process model it might be not clear, due its complexity, which elementary application services it actually provides.
The same problem is further increased by the rapid evolution of Internet technology in the direction of business-to-business (B2B) and customer-to-business (C2B) interaction scenarios. These latter moves in the industry will change the Web from content-centric to service-centric. FIG. 2 shows the players in the new service-centric Web. Companies no longer just publish documents, but offer their application services on the web and allow requesters to invoke those services directly; they are becoming Service Providers (200). There will be a hierarchy of service providers; some of them will offer services that are composed of services by other service providers. The “scripting together” of the individual services into higher-level services can be done by using a WFMS. The service requesters (210) themselves are no longer just the typical home/office users, but companies that need services; they “Bind” themselves to the service providers by calling application services. In this situation, Service Brokers (205) of the future are even more important than the content brokers in the content-centric web as of today. The quality of query results is crucial to the success of service brokers and service providers. The quality of queries depends on the quality of the taxonomies and the amount of population of the hierarchy with elementary application service offerings that the service brokers provide. The service brokers are adding value by collecting the information on available application services “Published” by a multitude of service providers and integrate these application services as a single point of access (similar to a “Web Portal” according to the content-centric web as of today). As visualized within FIG. 2 the service requesters will search the service brokers offerings to “Find” a reference to an appropriate application service, which finally will be exploited for accessing that particular application service by “Binding” to the service provider. In today's document-centric Web taxonomization is mostly done manually; an approach that seems to work at the moment. A manual approach for generating taxonomies for application services however not only suffers the disadvantages mentioned earlier (skills, consistency, effort) but these disadvantages are further aggravated by the fact that not only the number of application services is greater by orders of magnitude but that also the breadth and depth of required skill is significantly higher. Thus only an automatic method of generating taxonomies is feasible to solve these difficulties.